Thanks for the comments! The が used in the sentence bindings has the possessive meaning you mentioned in it, however, the popups only show a simpler definition (for space concerns). I do have plans in the future to open up user contributions to help mark up which definition for any given word is the one used in a sentence, but that functionality isn't built yet.
As to the second, I checked out my favorite jp-jp grammar dictionary, and while I do not doubt the む contraction, this particular grammar can also take the form of the actual negative V-ないがため. Since the formation in modern Japanese is most easily accomplished in the "remove ない, add ん", the note above is to emphasize that the verb in the construct does not carry a negative meaning.
These comments only live here on this page, but the usage notes (just above) may become part of the grammar dictionary in the future (where they are more easily visible), so I encourage you to add this information as a usage note :)
Thanks. That’s quite interesting. If -がため can be used with -ない but not carry a negative meaning (this isn’t surprising since -ため itself isn’t used to express a negative cause or negative volition), I wonder if that isn’t a modern Japanese back formation based on a misanalysis of ん. Unless they’ve learned it, modern speakers won’t be aware that ん comes from む, since む doesn’t exist in this form in modern Japanese (though it is also the source of the suffix よう), so they may be analogizing it to something they’re more familiar with. This kind of thing happens all the time. It would be interesting to see if there are any attested examples of -ないがため in pre-modern Japanese. I suspect not but don’t know.
A similar example of this is with が ごとし/ごとく/ごとき. The が here is likewise the possessive/attributive が and not the subject marker (though they have the same etymology). We see modern Japanese allows, in addition to nouns, the dictionary and casual past tense forms of verbs here. Historically, the verb form that preceded が was the 連体形 since that could function nominally, but it disappeared in modern Japanese, having merged with the 終止形 to create the modern dictionary form. I suspect the use of the casual past here is by analogy to what has become the dictionary form, as it’s strictly impossible for something that isn’t nominal to appear before が, either as subject marker or possessive/attributive, and neither the dictionary form of a verb nor the casual past are nominal. I believe native speakers simply see it as a fixed pattern and don’t really think about what the が is here, so it’s become grammatical as such in modern Japanese. As it is, the construction is rarely used and retains its Classical Japanese forms.
As for being able to tag the specific definition for how a word is used in context, that will be great someday. Sometimes it’s quite confusing when a word has widely different uses and the simple definition doesn’t always capture these. I appreciate the space constraint and this is a clever way to address the issue in the meantime. Renshuu is brilliant and I wish I’d discovered it even sooner!
